Experiments with Flipping the Classroom – Livescribe Echo Pen

After attending a ProGro Workshop on flipping the classroom, I became interested in trying to create my own audio visual content for learning. The tool that got my attention was something called the Livescribe Echo Pen. It recorded what you wrote on a piece of paper into an animation, as well as recording the audio at the same time. It also kept everything in sync, so that you could jump around the recording to any place you wanted to go. I was lucky enough to be able to get hold of one second hand from the Amazon Marketplace for +- R900. It took a while to get used to teaching to only a page, but I definitely learnt a a lot going through the process. Here is one of my first attempts – trying to explain the quadrilateral family of shapes.

Although I could accomplish my task of creating audio visual content for my learners. A lot of them seemed to struggle to get the correct version of Adobe Reader on their devices to properly see the animated drawings. There was also no way to upload the content to YouTube which was limiting. In the end whilst some learners enjoyed my videos, they weren’t easy enough to consume to warrant the effort. Also they were probably still a bit long. So after several experiments I decided this wasn’t the tool for me and continued my search for the right workflow elsewhere.